This blog highlights how applications built around DWF can do more than what can be done just using paper. The blog covers the building (architectural/electrical/construction), manufacturing, and infrastructure (e.g., GIS, telecommunications) industries.

January 15, 2007

Project Freewheel: DWF File Caching

A Mr. Richard Feder from Fort Lee, New Jersey writes in:

When I post a new DWF to my company's webpage, Project Freewheel is not finding it. As a test, I renamed an existing DWF to _old and gave the new DWF the existing name to see what would happen. Well, Project Freewheel found the original DWF file. Could someone explain the WHATs and WHYs of what might be happening here?

Software engineer and DWF Technical Evangelist, Ben Cochran, replied:

I am not sure why Project Freewheel could not locate your new file using the new path. When you use the old URL, the Freewheel server is not actually reading the DWF from your site; instead it is reading the file from the Freewheel server cache. In the future the cached file will be checked against what is on the internet to make sure the cache is current, but this has not yet been built.

Project Freewheel is currently a technology preview. This allows us to try technologies out before releasing them. In the case of the first Freewheel implementation, we targeted high risk unknowns like rendering speed, user interaction, and round trip internet latency problems to name a few. Now we are spending time rounding out Freewheel with proper cache management. The problems we are solving now are simpler because the solutions are more textbook, but it still takes time to implement.

The ability to view design data on any platform extends the reach of DWF. This allows DWF to go beyond what can be done with traditional paper.